For almost three months, QAnon conspiracy theoreticians have been anxiously awaiting the return of 8chan, the defunct, extremist-friendly message board that’s integral to their far-right fringe movement. The site’s heads have been clambering under attaching pressing to accompanied it back online, but at each turn, they’ve encountered an unlikely antagonist: 8chan’s own author.
As the self-described “Darkest Reaches of the Internet, ” 8chan is an anonymous, minimally moderated pulpit where sexism, depravity and violence have been not only accepted but encouraged, leading to the radicalization of some of its millions of users. The locate has faced an uncertain future since August, when its network provider pulled it offline in the wake of an alleged 8chan radical’s shooting rampage.
That massacre, which targeted Mexican immigrants in El Paso, Texas, was the third 8chan-linked terror attack in five months. Prior to gunning down their victims, all three alleged perpetrators posted obscene screeds to 8chan, where they were lauded after the bloodshed.
With 8chan now inaccessible, the letter board’s hordes of displaced hatemongers are searching for a new target to share loathsome material without retreat to the dark web. Proponents of QAnon, a hyperpartisan, cult-like conspiracy theory network, have grown specially anxious. 8chan was their only verifiable path of communication with their strange ruler, “Q, ” a person( or people) who claims to be a government insider and would post cryptic contents to 8chan under a unique user ID, or tripcode. Q has been silent since 8chan went dark.
8chan owner Jim Watkins, a rumored QAnon supporter himself, has been trying to fill his site’s void in recent weeks by resurrecting it as “8kun. ” But behind the scenes, anti-extremism activists have been blocking his efforts by tracking which entanglement service companies he’s been attempting to use to launch 8kun, then lobbying those conglomerates not to do business with him.
Spearheading that expedition is 25-year-old 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan.
“8kun will be just as bad as 8chan, ” Brennan, who sold 8chan to Watkins in 2016, told HuffPost in an interview from his home in Quezon City, Philippines, on Thursday. “It’s a bad-faith rebrand.”
Brennan says he has been a “thorn in[ Watkins’] side” since El Paso, which is when he says he realise just how poisonous his former site had become.
In the immediate aftermath of the carnage, Cloudflare, the notoriously content-neutral network provider 8chan was then using, steadfastly refused to boot it offline. Continuing to service 8chan was a “moral obligation, ” CEO Matthew Prince told the Guardian at the time. But less than 24 hours later, Prince announced that his companionship would, in fact, pull the plug on 8chan due to its “lawlessness[ that had] stimulated multiple heartbreaking deaths.” Prince’s head-spinning reversal came shortly after The New York Times published a front-page interview with Brennan in which he called for the meaning timber to be shut down.
Under pressure from Brennan and social media activists, other web service companies such as British firm Zare have cut Watkins as a client before 8kun could take off, VICE’s David Gilbert first reported Friday. After Zare drew out, Watkins, who was not available for an interview with HuffPost, then pivoted to Chinese tech whales Tencent and Alibaba. That didn’t last long, either: Alibaba lowered 8kun over the weekend; on Twitter, a company representative thanked Brennan for writing an open letter to Alibaba to deliver the matter to public attention.
Brennan’s crusade against unbridled online hate differentiates a conspicuous change from his past advocacy for free speech absolutism and ardent adoration of Segment 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the 1996 law that shields online middlemen from liability for user-generated content. As the owner of 8chan, Brennan repeatedly shirked accountability for abusive customer conduct on the programme — even at a time when it was being used as a vehicle for Gamergate, the molestation safarus that drove targeted female video game developers out of their homes. “Imageboards are a haven for[ appalling things ], ” he told Know Your Meme at the time. “That’s exactly what manufactures them such wonderful places.”
Although 8chan’s successor locate is off to a bumpy start, Brennan acknowledged that Watkins may eventually find a way to sustain 8kun long-term. If and when that happens, it will probably bring about “the second coming” of QAnon, according to Travis View, a resulting investigate of plot ideologies and a co-host of the podcast QAnon Anonymous.
“When 8kun comes online, that will certainly reinvigorate the[ QAnon] parish, ” View told HuffPost. “Q can’t post in any other place.”
QAnon’s “8chan refugees” are eagerly anticipating that site executives will move the tripcode engineering Q used as a style of identity proof on 8chan to 8kun, thereby enabling Q to communicate with them yet again, View explained.
The QAnon movement, which View supposes has accumulated hundreds of thousands of supporters since its origins in 2017, operates under the baseless belief that a “deep-state” cabal of satanic, liberal pedophiles are trying to overthrow President Donald Trump. Sheltered by obscurity, Q has used 8chan to falsely accuse a litany of Democrats and Hollywood elites of committing crimes including murder, child fornication trafficking and rape.
These solely unsubstantiated charges have infuriated members of the QAnon community, who usually call for the mass captivity and executing of Q’s targets. Merely this year, a fervent QAnon believer shot and killed him syndicate boss Francesco Cali because he believed Cali was “a prominent member of the deep state, ” according to the assailant’s defense lawyer.
Two daylights after Cali died at the hands of an obsessive QAnon supporter, a soldier posted a manifesto heavy-laden with grey nationalist scheme possibilities to 8chan, then killed dozens of worshippers at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. His scapegoats are among the more than 70 beings killed by alleged 8chan radicals this year alone.
Should 8chan — and by extension, Q — come back for good, it will likely exclusively be a matter of time before more lives are lost to senseless violence instigated online, Brennan argued.
“If 8kun manages to stay online, there will probably be another connected shooting, ” he said. “Nothing has really changed.”
Chicago Information Technology 